It is often required to identify articles as being associated with a related article. One example is luggage on a carousel that must be identified by its owner. Another example, which is used as the specific example herein, is the identification of a baby in a hospital maternity nursery with the baby's mother. A further similar application is the maintenance of contact between mineworkers who are assigned to be each other's “buddy” in a mine.
It is important in hospital nurseries to identify each infant with the highest degree of reliability. In particular, hospitals need to be assured that the newborn baby being presented to a mother for nursing is her own child.
It is known to provide infants and mothers in hospitals with tags in the form of identification bracelets. Such bracelets have been built that include electronic transmission elements that provide a specific identification that is associated with the bracelet. Such electronic bracelets, based on centralized signal reception and processing, have been used to monitor the presence of an infant or mother in a nursery or other room, the removal of an infant wearing such a bracelet from a nursery, and the presentation of an infant to its proper mother.
Such existing systems rely on room-mounted and doorway-mounted sensors that receive signals emitted by the bracelets and process data received from the bracelets in a central processor. By assigning differing, distinct signals to each bracelet, the presence of each bracelet, and each corresponding infant and mother, in a given area can be monitored by a central electronic control system.
A need exists for a system whereby objects may be associated with each other without reliance on a central processing system. Further, a need exists for a system wherein objects to be associated with each other can be assigned to each other in situ i.e., in each other's presence as in a birthing room. Further, such objects should preferably be assignable to each other on a versatile basis, i.e. any object from one set can be assigned or correlated to any object of a second set, and re-assigned but without loss of security.
It is known to provide tags for identifying luggage based on a system whereby the object-carried signal-emitting tag is matched with the locating scanner at the time that both these items are manufactured c.f. U.S. Pat. No. 5,798,693. Similarly, locating systems for lost golf clubs (U.S. Pat. No. 5,952,921) and lost golf balls (U.S. Pat. No. 6,011,466) have been proposed. It is also known to provide an office file locating system based on attaching individualized, signal emitting, tags to files and using an addressable scanner that can be set to receive and locate specific files according the signals emitted from the file tags c.f. U.S. Pat. No. 5,450,070. The contents of all of these referenced prior art patents are adopted herein by reference.
It is also known in an unrelated field for aircraft radar detection systems to scan the radar spectrum to detect whether an aircraft is being pulsed by a radar signal emitted from an external source, e.g. another aircraft radar or a ground-based radar. In this latter case the “signature” or signal profile of such radar pulses is classified and recorded by the radar detecting system for future reference and subsequent re-identification.
In all these cases, the correlation of the object and locator so that an identifying match can be established on a future encounter requires human intervention. A need exists for a correlation system by which a pair of objects in proximity to each other e.g., in situ can be associated with each other automatically, without any intervention other than by activation of the correlation process. A need also exists for systems by which, once such a correlation is established between objects that are initially versatile (in the sense of being capable of being matched with one or more of several, potential, partner objects), such objects have the capacity to become “bonded” or imprinted to a specific associated object or objects after a reset operation has cleared existing bonding and made the object available for re-bonding.
The present invention is directed to addressing the above objectives.
The invention in its general form will first be described, and then its implementation in terms of specific embodiments will be detailed with reference to the drawings following hereafter. These embodiments are intended to demonstrate the principle of the invention, and the manner of its implementation. The invention in its broadest and more specific forms will then be further described, and defined, in each of the individual claims which conclude this Specification.